Talking and Singing and Bananas

I am eating a banana. Man, is it good. I just worked out at Curves, and walked home in the frosty, winter air. A banana seemed like just the ticket.

Last Tuesday and Wednesday were the snow days. Home with the family, baking homemade cookies, ice sledding (not me, I was baking the cookies), a fire burning in the fireplace.
Ah, it was so relaxing!

Thursday, I flew to Houston. Nothing exciting to report there except that I LOVE SOUTHWEST AIRLINES! I loooooooooooooove the skycaps. In Austin, Gene and Randy ALWAYS seem to be working. I love lugging my guitars and bags up to their outside line cuz they always greet me, “Hey, Sara! Where to today? You sure been working alot!” Plus, tell me if you don’t notice this yourself next time you are at a Southwest Airlines terminal. EVERYONE who works for Southwest has GOOD TEETH! Nice and white and shiny. And everyone is smiling. The women call me “Hon”. Maybe I will take them all some bananas next time I fly.

I’m not sure if I reported this, but when I was in Denver, I had a very negative experience with a rental car company. I don’t normally have negative experiences. But this company had a female employee behind the counter who was popping chocolate kisses in her mouth while trying to talk to me. Her teeth were hard to look at, she was hard to understand, and she was EATING IN FRONT OF a customer….plus, she didn’t say, “You want one?” Not that I wanted one, but…how rude! Really.

So, this time, I got on the shuttle to ENTERPRISE, and DID NOT have to load my bags onto the shuttle. I had a chirpy 55 year old man who would NOT allow me to carry them on, and after I was seated comfortably, opened a cooler and handed me a cold bottle of water. YES! That’s what I’m talking about, people!

We’re driving, he’s chatting, we’re laughing and talking and he pulls up to the Enterprise rental facility, and as the doors open up, three handsome 20 something year old men in SUITS greet me as the door unfold open. They, too, wouldn’t hear of my carrying my bags, greeted me by NAME (“Welcome, Miss HIckman!”) and walked me through the lobby straight to the car…which was a gorgeous, brand new creme colored PT Cruiser! I didn’t have to do ANY paper work (I’d done it all online!). Everyone was smiling and waving me goodbye. I felt like
Alice in Wonderland, except no one was shouting “Off with her head!”

Drove to Livingston to stay with my mom and dad at their RV Chalet.
Spoke that night at First United Methodist Church about God, music and how the two have always been intertwined for me. I spoke to about 60 women after we had a yummy dinner of potato soup and salad. Then I spent Friday at the house, relaxing and writing notes; I started a new living journal with a young lady I met at the event. I hope she’ll write back!

Saturday morning I drove to Houston to stay with one of my oldest best friends…Julie! Julie has four children and a very smart husband and they live on what I call a “farm in the city”.
They eat fresh eggs from their chickens and grow food in their garden and they have a picket fence that runs around the perimeter of their baby blue house. It’s always a blast to stay with Julie’s family because they LOVE TO READ and we can have conversations about the presidents and their doodling habits to the death penalty to Super Happy Funland (an all ages club with no alcohol…) The amazing thing is that Julie has not aged in my eyes at all. She still looks like the 16 year old I performed with in the Folk Group. (Creative name, huh?) She has lovely freckles and deep eyes and hair that reminds me of Rapunzel, except that it grows so fast and thick she can give it to help kids with cancer, whereas Rapunzel just wanted the prince to rescue her and that wasn’t really helping anyone.

I sang at Unitunes on Saturday night and let me tell you….THIS PLACE IS AWESOME! I give it 99 stars! If I gave it 100, you’d think I was lying, so I will stick with 99.

I have now dubbed it the “Carnegie Hall of the South”. The sound equipment was top notch, and the engineer running sound had me feeling like a million bucks! All the folks that run the coffeehouse are very polite and friendly, and the minute you walk into this building (Emerson Unitarian Church on Bering Dr), you just feel immense LOVE. I am so excited to find out I will be returning in November!

Oh, also, I’d like to mention my gratitude for the omnipresent KPFT, their great radio programming, and special thanks to Larry Winters for having me on his show. I get the feeling Larry was expecting Laura Ingalls Wilder and that he was pleasantly surprised to learn I’m really a mixture of sugar and spice! I’m Carly Simon meets David Sedaris! Ha ha ha.